Why Women Have Sex (39 page)

—predominantly homosexual woman, age 26

Many studies have been conducted in which the researchers describe different rape scenarios and then ask people to rate things such as the severity or harmfulness of the rape. Respondents often rate the rapes as less harmful to a woman when the perpetrator is her husband, not a stranger. Perhaps some of these attitudes about marital rape can be traced historically to the belief that it was a man’s right to have sex with his wife, and rape within a marital context was not unlawful. Decades ago, the approach of Lord Hale, an eighteenth-century British jurist, was integrated into American rape statutes: “But the husband cannot be guilty of a rape committed by himself upon his lawful wife, for by their mutual matrimonial consent and contract the wife hath given up her self in this kind unto the husband which she cannot retract.”

It was not until as recently as 1993 that all fifty U.S. states changed these long-standing laws and made marital rape a crime. Currently,
marital clauses in the laws of thirty states still provide that a husband cannot be charged with rape under certain conditions, such as if his wife is unconscious, asleep, or mentally or physically impaired.

Still, today not all countries have laws that criminalize marital rape; in fact, a law recently passed in Afghanistan actually legalizes it. One clause stipulates that “as long as the husband is not traveling, he has the right to have sexual intercourse with his wife every fourth night.” Another asserts that “unless the wife is ill or has any kind of illness that intercourse could aggravate, the wife is bound to give a positive response to the sexual desires of her husband.” This law applies only to the Shiite community, which comprises 20 percent of the population of Afghanistan, a country with 30 million people. Sunnis in the country are exempt from the law. U.S. president Barack Obama called the law “abhorrent.” International protests have called for its repeal, and they may succeed. Nonetheless, the controversial law highlights the problem of marital rape—a problem that affects millions of women worldwide, even in countries that criminalize it.

In addition to the many negative psychological consequences that often follow a history of sexual abuse, rape can disrupt a woman’s sexual functioning in later consensual relationships. Research conducted in the Meston Sexual Psychophysiology Lab shows that many sexually abused women report sexual difficulties that persist for decades after the abuse. Some report having no desire for sex whatsoever, and others report the opposite—engaging in frequent indiscriminate and high-risk sexual activities. Some women report being so anxious and fearful about sex that they experience panic attacks when their partners initiate sex. Others report having difficulties becoming sexually aroused or having an orgasm, and some women experience intense pain during sexual intercourse with their partners. Some women develop vaginismus, a specific type of sexual pain disorder wherein the muscles surrounding a woman’s vagina involuntarily tighten and make intercourse or even inserting a tampon impossible.

How effective treatment will be depends on the type of sexual abuse and whether it involved penetration or physical harm, the frequency of abuse, the age at which the abuse occurred, and who the abuser was. The hopeful news is that the past decade has seen great progress in
developing successful therapeutic techniques, such as Stress Inoculation Training and Prolonged Exposure, to treat women who have suffered sexually abusive experiences. Stress Inoculation Training involves psychotherapy, role-playing, deep muscle relaxation and controlled breathing exercises, coping skills, and thought-stopping techniques to counter ruminative or obsessive thinking about the traumatic experience. Prolonged Exposure involves having the woman relive the assault by imagining it as vividly as possible and describing it aloud, in the present tense, to her therapist. The woman is asked to repeat the rape scenario several times during each therapy session. She usually attends ten therapy sessions and, in addition, listens to a tape recording of herself telling the assault story at least once a day for homework. In the short term, the exposure to the rape image often increases anxiety, but after a period of time anxiety is significantly diminished as the woman habituates to it. One study that compared nine biweekly ninety-minute sessions of supportive counseling, Stress Inoculation Training, and Prolonged Exposure found that all three treatments produced substantial improvements in rape-related distress, general anxiety, PTSD, and depression among women rape victims. But of the three types of treatment, Prolonged Exposure had the greatest long-lasting effects on PTSD symptoms.

In our study, one woman explained how counseling helped restore her sense of self-worth:

When I was a freshman in college when I was seventeen years old, I went on a date with a friend. We had a nice time and went out for pizza and a walk around college. He came back to my room with me and climbed into my bed and we slept, which was not an uncommon occurrence for us, as we were friends. I woke up later in the night to him touching my genital regions and when I said no he continued to force me to have intercourse with him. He was much larger than me and I was afraid to fight back with more than my words because I was fearful that he was going to hurt me. In the morning when I kicked him out I felt ashamed and dirty and used. I sought help at the hospital but spent the next few
months in a deep depression. I received counseling and was able to get a better understanding that I was a worthy and beautiful person.

—heterosexual woman, age 23

The Meston Lab is conducting a five-year study to examine the effectiveness of a simple writing intervention in helping women with a history of early abusive experiences deal with current sexual and relational concerns. All of the women in our study previously had traumatic sexual experiences and are currently in consensual sexual relationships. In the study, the women write for thirty minutes, once a week for a minimum of five weeks, on how they view themselves as a sexual person. We encourage them to link their thoughts to past, current, and future sexual experiences or relationships, and to be as detailed as possible in their writing. So far the findings are encouraging. Many women who have completed the study show substantial improvement in their ability to enjoy sexual activities with their current partners. Enormously gratifying is the fact that a number of women have said that participating in our study has changed their lives.

We do not know exactly how writing about a traumatic event can have positive therapeutic effects, but there are several likely reasons. One is that writing allows a person to release negative feelings, in a safe environment, that may otherwise be inhibited or avoided. It provides a cathartic release of emotions. Another is that writing provides a way to psychologically reorganize the traumatic memory in a structured and coherent way. When you write about an event, as opposed to just thinking about it, you are naturally forced to give the event a beginning, a middle, and an end. This structuring puts the memory of abuse into the context of the past, and it may be more likely to “stay put” in the past where it belongs rather than constantly intruding into and disrupting present-day events. Finally, through the writing process, individuals receive repeated exposure to aversive thoughts and feelings. Although this may create a temporary increase in anxiety, repeated exposure to the aversive memory through repeated writing makes it have less and less of an emotional impact.

There is good evidence that rape is not a recent phenomenon, but rather has a long and disturbing history. The anthropologist Peggy Sanday examined 156 tribal societies from a database known as the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample. She found that rape rates were particularly high in patrilocal cultures—those in which a married couple reside with or near the husband’s parents. Other studies confirm that when women lack genetic kin in close proximity, rates of rape and spousal abuse increase. Sanday found higher rape rates in tribal societies in which intertribal feuding and warfare were common. Indeed, of the several factors that characterize cultures with high rape rates, including lack of female power and lack of female political decision making, cultures characterized by a male ideology that valorized toughness and fighting ability showed the highest rape rates.

The human historical record confirms the ubiquity of rape across cultures and over time. Biblical sources are replete with rules for rape and for dealing with rapists. An Assyrian law from the second millennium BCE carries this injunction: “If a seignior took the virgin by force and ravished her, either in the midst of the city . . . or at a city festival, the father of the virgin shall take the wife of the virgin’s ravisher and give her to be ravished.” In the King James Bible, Numbers 31:17–18 and 31:35 state: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves. . . . And thirty and two thousand persons in all, of woman that had not known man by lying with him.” And in Genesis 34, a Hittite prince rapes Dinah, the daughter of Jacob: He “saw her . . . took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.”

Historical records also show that rape was especially common in war. Some anthropologists have proposed that the sexual acquisition of women by force was the primary reason for going to war to begin with. The feared conqueror Genghis Khan (1162–1227) explicitly relished rape as one of the key benefits attained through warfare: “The greatest pleasure is to vanquish your enemies, to chase them before you, to rob them of their wealth, to see their near and dear bathed in tears, to ride
their horses and sleep on the white bellies of their wives and daughters.” Similar patterns of rape in war, amply documented by Susan Brown-miller in her book
Against Our Will
, continue in modern warfare. The Japanese invasion of Nanking during World War II, for example, resulted in an estimated twenty thousand rapes of young Chinese girls and women. The Russian assault on Germany in 1945 produced rapes of massive numbers of women, where “Soviet soldiers treated German women much more as sexual spoils of war.” Even more recently, an estimated twenty thousand Bosnian Muslim women were raped by Bosnian Serbs in the mid-1990s. And in her confirmation hearings to become secretary of state in January 2009, Hillary Clinton listed widespread rape as a tool of war in the Congo as among the pressing foreign policy issues that would be facing the United States.

The human history of rape is even depicted in art and literature. The rape of the Sabine women, for example, narrated by Livy and Plutarch, depicts a legend in which the Romans invited the Sabines to a festival with the goal of killing off the men and abducting the women to make them wives. The legend produced a wealth of art during the Renaissance and was portrayed in the twentieth century by Pablo Picasso.

The key point of this brief historical review is simply to show that rape has been a recurrent horror for women across cultures and throughout human history. We do not need a formal theory to tell us that rape inflicts heavy costs on rape victims, but it is important to examine
why
rape is experienced as so traumatic. From an evolutionary perspective, the costs of rape include interference with women’s mate choice, one of the cardinal features of women’s sexual strategies. A raped woman risks an unwanted and untimely pregnancy with a man she has not chosen. Victims of rape risk being blamed or punished, resulting in damage to their social reputations and their future desirability on the mating market. And if a raped woman already has a boyfriend or husband, she risks being abandoned by him. Finally, raped women typically suffer psychological humiliation, anxiety, fear, rage, and depression, as we witnessed in the heart-wrenching descriptions from the women in our studies.

Given the appalling costs that rape inflicts on women, it would defy logic if women had not developed defenses designed to prevent its
occurrence and to cope with its aftermath. Women in the fields of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology have been at the forefront of hypothesizing and investigating women’s anti-rape defenses:

•   The formation of alliances with males as special friends for protection (anthropologist Barbara Smuts)

•   Mate selection based on qualities of men such as physical size and social dominance that deter other men from sexual aggression (psychologists Margo Wilson and Sarah Mesnick)

•   The cultivation of female-female co ali tions for protection (Barbara Smuts)

•   The development of specialized fears that motivate women to avoid situations in which they might be in danger of rape (psychologists Tara Chavanne and Gordon Gallup)

•   The avoidance of risky activities during ovulation to decrease the odds of sexual assault when women are most likely to conceive (Tara Chavanne and Gordon Gallup)

•   Psychological pain from rape that motivates women to avoid rape in the future in similar circumstances (anthropologist Nancy Thornhill and biologist Randy Thornhill)

There is some scattered evidence of the effectiveness of all of these defenses, although in our view, women’s anti-rape defenses have been sorely neglected by the scientific community and urgently warrant allocation of research funds.

To these potential anti-rape defenses, we propose three more. One is
maintaining physical proximity to close kin
. In ancestral conditions, women grew up within a small-group context, surrounded by genetic relatives—a father, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, mother, sisters, aunts, and grandmothers—all of whom could either deter potential rapists or inflict massive costs on them. In the modern environment, however, women often leave the protective envelope of close kin to go to college or to take jobs in large urban areas, making them more vulnerable to potential rapists. We would never discourage women from attending college or taking jobs in large cities, of course. Rather, we wish to point
out that one key anti-rape defense that almost certainly helped to protect ancestral women from rape is no longer available to many modern women. Women who lack genetic kin in close proximity likely have to activate other anti-rape defenses, such as cultivating female-female coalitions or male “special friends” who offer protection and deter potential rapists.